History of Science Society Annual Meeting 2024: Plastic Temporalities
At the 2024 HSS Annual Meeting, Jeremy Greene convened the roundtable Plastic Temporalities: Ecologies of Disposability in Science and Medicine, bringing together historians and anthropologists to examine the material histories of plastics across laboratories, hospitals, and clinical settings.
The session explored how everyday objects - petri dishes, syringes, catheters, pipettes, gloves - became disposable, and how their cumulative waste now shapes global environmental and health challenges. Presentations highlighted how the temporalities of plastic, from single-use moments to long-term ecological persistence, complicate efforts to build sustainable scientific and medical futures.
Panelists included After the Single Use researcher Anne Kveim Lie, as well as Peter Mangesho, Adriana Fraser, Amana Mahoney, and Helge Jordheim, who drew on research spanning institutional supply chains, regulatory archives, environmental justice activism, and global clinical practice.
This roundtable underscored the role of historical research in informing sustainability debates and rethinking the future of medical and scientific waste. Read the full abstract below:
---
Quietly, in the late 20th century, plastics replaced glassware as the dominant substrate of scientific and medical practice. To the scientific virtues shared with glass (transparency, inertness, sterilizability), plastics added new qualities (economy, ductility, and disposability). But as the 21st century sciences of planetary health now indicate, the long-term health costs of plastic’s temporal range—stretching back to the limits of the Carboniferous to an indefinite future, from the brevity of the single-use to the longevity of nonbiodegradable landfills, airborne dioxins, seaborne waste-islands, and omnipresent microplastics--require new reckoning. This roundtable assembles historians and anthropologists of science, medicine, and temporality to discuss the unexplored histories of plastic infrastructures in laboratories, hospitals, and clinics across different geographies (from Baltimore to Oslo to Dar-es-Salaam) and the role of historical research in shaping more sustainable futures for scientific and medical practice.
The panelists will draw from their current research on the material histories of common objects which have been rendered disposable (petri dishes, pipettes, catheters, syringes, and gloves) and which cumulatively now constitute a bioscientific waste stream that is responsible for nearly 10% of global carbon emissions. These vignettes will then frame vital questions for the field on how historians can insert new and necessary kinds of temporal thinking into contemporary policymaking on sustainability in science and medicine, and the relations of climate and health Drawing on a variety of disciplinary positions (ethnography of global clinical trials, local records of institutional purchasing and supplies, oral histories with environmental justice activists, repositories of regulatory and marketing materials), our roundtable will sketch out theory, methods, and broader role for global historians of science in reckoning with the future of scientific and medical wastefulness.